A few months ago, there were predictions that the world would end (thankfully it did not). Then this past week, came the earthquake and now Hurricane Irene. To be sure these are scary and dangerous events but they are made scarier by the hype of the media. Watching the coverage of Hurricane Irene , one can’t help but feel like the world as we know it is going to end.
Does your company or nonprofit communicate effectively with your important audiences? If yours is like many enterprises that I encounter, the answer might be that you don’t because you don’t have a good communications team. That is a lame explanation for a failure in leadership communications.
Living in the Washington, DC area, I am painfully aware of how inflamed our public discourse is today. Just look at the rhetoric flying between the two parties in Congress over a potential government shutdown. In business interactions it’s easy to see how simple matters often get blown out of proportion. Language isn’t the only culprit but it can certainly play a role in whether the recipient of messages hears and understands what the sender intended.
Has the Internet and text messaging made us sloppier in the way we communicate? And if it has affected our language skills, does it matter? This is a question a client and I were discussing the other day.
Todd Defren had a great post recently on his blog PR Squared. The post is entitled, “If You Only Do Three Things in Social Media” and one of them was blogging. In his post, he notes that, yes blogging is hard and time consuming but very worthwhile because it encourages people to create content, respect each other by commenting and helping to make content more relevant to target audiences and it is timeless.
A lighthouse helps sailors find their way to shore. Last week at the Creative Problem Solving Institute Conference in Buffalo, I found my own lighthouse of sorts, the Osborn-Parnes (Alex Osborn and Sid Parnes (the guys who coined the word “brainstorming”) Creative Problem Solving (CPS) process.
Today the respected British medical journal, The Lancet issued a retraction of Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 study that links measles vaccines to autism and caused so many parents to put their children at risk by NOT getting them vaccinated.
It is the simplest things that can mean the most. And that is the case with two words: thank you. Unfortunately, they don’t get used enough at home or in the workplace. All too often when people do good things, nice things, it is taken for granted. This is especially true in business where leadership communications should matter most. When an employee does a good job, very often the boss doesn’t say anything–” isn’t that what I’m paying you to do,” is the logic there.
Stop the world. Not literally. But I sure would like to stop the poor use of several words that seem to show up often in press releases, articles and, it just seems, everywhere. When used well, this language greatly assists understanding. Unfortunately, they are so overused that they have become almost meaningless.
This the Wainger Group’s blog reborn after several months of silence. In this space, we are dedicated to having meaningful conversations about effective leadership communications. The goal isn’t more press clips or tweets about us or our clients but about getting people to understand each other and to act in meaningful and effective ways. Isn’t that what communications is really all about?
